The first wave and its reversal · 1917–1940

1917 – 1940

Recruited, then dismissed: Fort Wayne's Great Migration began as other cities' did — with labor shortage. In 1917–18, with war demand and postwar strikes pressing, a number of Fort Wayne manufacturers recruited Black workers from the South, and the city's Black population rose from 572 in 1910 to 1,454 in 1920 and an estimated 2,200 within two years. Then the reversal that distinguishes Fort Wayne's record: after the unions' defeat in the final wave of postwar strikes in 1922, hiring stopped. Only a handful of firms took on new Black workers; many newcomers were dismissed from industry altogether, left to choose between poorly paid service work and leaving for Gary, Chicago or Detroit. Those who stayed in manufacturing were confined to the foundry and laboring jobs white workers did not want. The 1920s made the exclusion a policy. The Chamber of Commerce's campaign to attract new industry sold Fort Wayne's workforce — predominantly of German, Irish and British extraction — as more "reliable, enterprising, and hardworking" than labor in cities where immigrants and Blacks were numerous, and the firms that came shared the outlook: of the fifteen businesses that located in Fort Wayne between 1925 and 1932, only International Harvester would hire Black workers at all, and a 1937 survey counted just 125 Black employees among its more than 4,000 — with Bass Foundry (45) and the Pennsylvania Railroad (15) the next largest employers. The National Urban League's Charles S. Johnson surveyed the city's Black population in 1928; his is the first of the studies the Urban League would keep making of this community for forty years.

The Depression fell hardest on the smallest margin. In 1940 the unemployment rate among Black Fort Wayners was 38 percent, against 11 percent among whites; of 455 Black men counted as employed, the census recorded two semiskilled operatives in manufacturing and forty-eight factory laborers. More than four-fifths of employed Black women worked as servants, cooks or cleaning ladies, earning on average about a third of what white women earned — excluded not only from the factories where white women worked by the thousands but from clerical work, from the telephone and telegraph exchanges, and from teaching, nursing and sales. Black citizens did not receive an equitable share of federal work relief, and the community's small middle class watched its own children leave: Morgan preserves a 1934 letter from Marjorie Wickliffe, of one of the city's longest-established Black families, pleading with the politician R. Earl Peters to help her daughter, a Fisk University graduate, find teaching work elsewhere in Indiana — "Fort Wayne doesn't have anything to offer a Negro in the school system." The name would stay in the community's record: the Fort Wayne NAACP's annual Freedom Fund Banquet is the Marjorie D. Wickliffe Freedom Fund Banquet.

Sources:

1. Iwan W. Morgan, "Latecomers to the Industrial City: African Americans, Jobs, and Housing in Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1940–1960," Indiana Magazine of History 95 (March 1999) — the 1917–18 recruiting, the 1922 reversal, the Chamber campaign, the fifteen firms, the 1940 unemployment and census figures, and the Wickliffe letter (Marjorie Wickliffe to R. Earl Peters, 5 June 1934, Earl Peters Papers, Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society).
2. Peggy Seigel, "Pushing the Color Line: Race and Employment in Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1933–1963," Indiana Magazine of History 104 (September 2008) — the 1937 survey figures (Harvester 125 of 4,000; Bass Foundry 45; Pennsylvania Railroad 15) and the record of Black women's employment and wages.
3. Charles S. Johnson, "A Survey of the Negro Population of Fort Wayne, Indiana," National Urban League, Department of Research and Investigations, 1928 — as cited by Morgan.